Forced carnal knowledge, whatever else it may be, is good physical exercise and represents meaningful variation on normal marital relations. As pleasure, however, it has its limitations. For myself, I was so distracted that night be scratches, bites and screams, and by wondering whether one could be arrested for violating one’s wife (was pinching a felony or a misdemeanor?), that I must warn male readers that although desirable as a tactic, as pleasure one might better employ a quiet night alone with pornography.

Seduction is the art of making normal, desirable, good and rewarding what had previously seemed abnormal, undesirable, evil and unrewarding. Seduction was the art of changing another’s audience and hence his personality. I refer, of course, to the classical seduction of the ‘innocent’ and not the mutual masturbation of promiscuous adults.

To change man, the audience by which he judges himself must be changed. A man is defined by his audience: by the people, institutions, authors, magazines, movie heroes, philosophers by whom he pictures himself being cheered and booed. Major psychological disturbances, ‘identity crises,’ are caused when an individual begins to change the audience for whom he plays: from parents to peers; from peers to the works of Albert Camus; from the Bible to Hugh Hefner. The change from I-am-he-who-is-a-good-son to I-am-he-who-is-a-good-buddy constitutes a revolution. On the other hand, if the man’s buddies approve fidelity one year and infidelity the next, and the man changes from faithful husband to rake, no revolution has occurred. The class rule remains intact; only the policy of on a minor matter has been altered.

Lil and I had met and mated when we were both twenty-five. We formed a deep, irrational, obviously neurotic need for one another: love – one of society’s many socially accepted forms of madness. We got married: society’s solution to loneliness, lust and laundry. We soon discovered that there is absolutely nothing wrong with being married which being single can’t cure. Or so, for a while, it seemed to us.

‘You don’t feel like it today? Who cares? You think I feel like spilling out my garbage three days a week? Come on, Dr Rhinehart, you’ve gotta like it. The world is built on the principle that all humans eat shit regardless of taste.

‘You’re dreaming. There are no Utopias. There can be no perfect man. Each of our lives is a finite series of errors which tend to become rigid and repetitious and necessary. Every man’s personal proverb about himself is: “Whatever is, is right, in the best of all possible people.” The whole tendency is . . . the whole tendency of the human personality is to solidify into the corpse. You don’t change corpses. Corpses aren’t bubbling with enthusiasm. You spruce them up a bit and make them fit to be looked at.’

The effect of two crawling, begging, drunken women wiggling their way toward me was that I got an erection, not professionally or maritally the most helpful response, but sincere. Somehow I felt that more was expected of a sage.